He was very sincere and very quick. She ended up liking him. He asked if she would be willing to pose right there on the station platform with her latest masterpiece, “Listening,” which had been drawn from life in our own Soviet Union, but she explained that it was already packed away. He smiled understandingly.
She asked him what he aimed to do with his life, and he said that he wanted to document the progress of the Communist Revolution here and throughout the world. He was considering attending the State School of Photography if he could find somebody to help him. He wanted to go into films.
Käthe nodded, leaning against Karl’s shoulder. All she wanted to do was take her seat on the train and rest. If she never answered another question again, except from her grandchildren, that would be so perfect! At the same time, she couldn’t bring herself to be rude to the young man. If she could only keep Karl from realizing how tired she was! Trying to rescue her, he would surely hurt the young man’s feelings.
Excuse me, my dear, she said to him, but could you kindly repeat your name? We elderly people find ourselves becoming a bit stupid, unfortunately.
Of course, Frau Kollwitz! My name is Karmen, Roman Lazarevich. Perhaps someday I’ll make a name for myself.
And where did you say you come from?
Odessa. This camera is actually my late father’s. It’s all he was able to leave me. The White Guards tortured him because he’d published a few articles in the Communist press. Later they released him, but he never recovered. He died quite young.
You poor, poor child, said Käthe, shaking her head. She hoped that her husband hadn’t heard. Karl, who’d lost his own father and mother early, was easily upset by such cases.
It’s a common story, unfortunately. Your expression is perfect; could you hold still for just a moment?
And the handsome young Karmen in his corduroy cap, smoothfaced, sighted through the camera, whose bellows were part way extended and locked in position by the steel X across the top; she saw that the metal lens board of the front standard was armored, and so was everything else.
(Shall I describe that perfect expression of hers? She conveyed an impression most of all of sad steadiness; not only did she no longer need any model but herself, but she’d turned into one of her own sculptures. Her eyes were not unlike Shostakovich’s in that grief seemed almost ready to explode out of them, like corpses flying into the air when a stray shell hits a mass grave.)
He didn’t seem at all bitter. There was something in him of Peter’s, of that mobilized idealism we all had in Germany during that first week (although old Reschke in the Café Monopol had probably got it right when he said to her: God be thanked that mobilization is happening; the suspense wouldn’t have been bearable anymore… )—when Peter joined the colors she’d thought him still a child; he was eighteen and a half; but his enthusiasm moved her almost to tears; as for Karl, he’d said: This noble young generation, we must work so that we can measure up to them.—That was at the beginning, of course, when even she had believed the Kaiser, and Peter still lived.
How old were you when your father died?
Fourteen, he replied with his quick smile. That was when the Poles took Kiev—
He clicked the shutter; the magnesium powder flashed.
Thank you, Frau Kollwitz. I’ll send you a copy. Well, this camera gave me my start, but I’m now becoming bored with still photography. I don’t think it represents the dynamism of our new age. Have you seen the Rodchenko exhibit?
Yes, I have, she said politely. Comrade Alexandrov had arranged to take her. She had hated it.
Well, those strange angles, those distortions, I love that! And he’s useful, too; he does billboards which catch people’s interest and educate them. Only I want to go farther! I want to animate everything! At the same time, it’s important to remain true to life, as you’ve always been. I won’t make escapist films; I’ll make documentaries.
He now reminded her so much of Peter that she could hardly bear it; specifically, he reminded her of Peter in the last month of his life, smiling in his dark uniform with its column of big shiny buttons; he wore his new cap as often as he could and he kept gazing off into what he thought was the future.
That sounds very admirable, said Käthe, smiling at him. And now I must board my train.
May I please ask you for one bit of advice? said the young man.
It’s time to go, said Karl.
I’ll gladly help you, Roman Lazarevich. But only if you don’t cause me to miss my train!
Where was Karl now? Oh, God be thanked, he’d gotten all the luggage on board…
This young Roman Lazarevich flashed her one of his quick smiles and said to her: How terrible it must seem to be a mother who weeps over her dead child, and a man to see it and film it! At least that’s how I imagine it. I haven’t made any films yet, but I know that it’s going to be my task to seek out misery and hopefully to reveal its causes and solutions. So in a sense I want to become the next Käthe Kollwitz. I want to devote my life to women and dead children. But it seems wrong to use them for any purpose, even for the universal good.
Karl, whose smallish eyes seemed ever in retreat behind his glasses, was back now and had slipped his arm around her. He murmured: You’re not obliged to answer that if you don’t wish it, Käthe.
What should she have said? Should she have confessed that without ever asking she’d caught that gaunt man who grimaced under his tophat and imprisoned him forever in her Weavers’ Series? That was true, but how much more often she’d hunted down her own ancient, exhausted face!
All at once she thought she was going to cry again. She would have hated that more than anything.
She said: Roman Lazarevich, with me it’s very simple. The woman with the dead child is me, myself. And the child is also myself.
And so they came back through the arch-shaped door at number twenty-five Weissenbürgerstrasse. Peter’s room remained the same as it had been thirteen years ago, with his white bed made up just so, his framed silhouette on the wall, the glass panes closed on his cabinet of boyish curiosities; flowers in the vase, clothes on the hooks.
A commentator notes that in the diaries one finds almost nothing about this journey, and even her son in Berlin, to whom she so often reported in such detail on all her trips, seems to have received only one letter from her. All the same, she must have been contented with her experience, because the following year, while the sleepwalker, wearing a business suit and a fancy hat, was giving another speech in Hamburg, striding back and forth in a frenzy, with a short riding-whip in his hand, Käthe finished chiseling out a woodcut of Elisabeth pregnant with Johannes and Maria pregnant with Jesus, took off her apron, sat down at the wide wooden table in the living room, then wrote Gorki: All that I saw in Russia I saw in the light of the Soviet star. Coming from a German, her next sentence now seems ironic, to say the least: And I have a longing to go again, deep into the land, to the Volga. Fourteen years later her grandson, who was also named Peter, would die there, drowned in an eddy of bullets and bombs near the great whirlpool called Stalingrad.
She didn’t gaze out the window so much nowadays, so I can’t report whether or not she saw the man in the tophat parading up and down the cobblestones of Weissenbürgerstrasse with his fellow Brownshirts; perhaps, he’d died by then; the grocer’s apprentice was long in the grave. She was much too busy to take in the late summer light, let alone the mist on the Wannsee; she was too encumbered with honors. By the time the Great Depression stabbed her Republic in the back, they had promoted her to department head of the Prussian Academy of Arts. When Shostakovich’s Second Symphony premiered, she was making another dark woodcut, the mother’s face blurred like a shrouded mummy’s, the little one apparently dead; she called it “Sleeping with Child.”